1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic publishing, more particularly to information creation, management and publication of a type typically performed by online services.
2. State of the Art
Online services (such as Compuserve, Genie. Prodigy, America Online, and more recently e.World, among others) have become increasing popular as the price of computers and modems has decreased. At the same time as media attention has been directed toward the "information super-highway," particularly the Internet, subscription to and usage of online services of all descriptions has continued to increase.
From the perspective of a computer user, online services have become easier to use. Command-line interlaces have been replaced by front-end search tools and graphical user interfaces. As with a play, however, much "behind-the-scenes" work is involved in creating, managing and publishing information to an online service.
Presently, information publishers take portions of their content in whatever form they have it--typically a collection of files in the publisher's filing system--and from that content produce directly a script of some sort, for example in a scripting language such as Rainman Pro. characterized by numerous embedded commands. Publishers have to manually keep track of the ID numbers that they use on a particular host. The same manual process is performed from scratch for each different service that the publisher publishes on. Not only is there no one tool that can support a publisher across each of a variety of platforms, but there does not appear to be so much as a tool that can support a publisher on even a single platform (i.e., America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy). The task is left very much up to each publisher to construct an update script based on various documents, following all of the rules of the applicable scripting language, sometimes literally keeping a spiral notebook to keep track of IDs used on various services.
Whatever tools may have been developed to facilitate the foregoing process are generally custom, in-house tools. To the inventors's best knowledge, there does not presently exist any general-purpose tool to allow an information provider to easily create, manage and publish information to an online service.